In 1974, Kiryat Shmona was
the scene of a terrorist attack in which 18 Israelis, many of them
children, were killed. Rockets have clobbered the town during
cross-border fighting. Underground shelters are as familiar to the city
as traffic lights. And jobs can be scarce.

Yet somehow, Kiryat Shmona’s professional soccer team has become the
runaway leader of Israel’s top league, has captured a separate
tournament that concluded this week and has begun to turn perceptions of
this often-beleaguered community upside down.

For now, the king of soccer in this country is a team that plays in a
5,500-seat stadium, has a diverse 23-man roster that includes six
Israeli Arabs and is still adjusting to the curiosity it is creating.

When The New York Times recently contacted Adi Faraj,
the club’s 26-year-old press officer, about doing an article about the
team, he was initially convinced the phone call was a hoax.

“Why would The New York Times want to write about us?” he said.

But as its remarkable run of victories mounts, more and more
attention will come its way. On Tuesday, a sizable contingent of the
city’s residents traveled south to Petah Tikva to watch its team take on
a traditional Israeli power — Hapoel Tel Aviv — in the final of the Toto Cup, the first major tournament of the season.

In a grueling contest, Kiryat Shmona surrendered a late goal that tied the score but prevailed in a penalty-kick shootout.

More impressively, the club has an 11-point lead at the top of Israel’s 16-team Premier League,
putting it on course for its first league championship and, remarkably,
a qualifying spot in the world’s richest and most prestigious soccer
club competition, the Europe-based UEFA Champions League.

If Kiryat Shmona gets
that far, it will become one of the smallest clubs to qualify for the
Champions League and will find itself, at least technically, alongside
powerhouse clubs like Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid. For
comparison, think, perhaps, of a community college somehow showing up in
the N.C.A.A. Division I basketball bracket in March.

That this long-shot team — officially known as Hapoel Ironi Kiryat
Shmona — has been able to get this far has already shaken up Israeli
soccer, which is normally dominated by clubs from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem
and Haifa, with their bigger budgets.

Beyond that, the team has given a city that has often felt marginalized and neglected a sense of pride.

“Today, it’s like a dream,” Almorg Moryoussef, a 23-year-old student,
said as he stood outside Ironi Stadium in Kiryat Shmona last Saturday
as the team prepared to play Ironi Nir Ramat HaSharon and local fans —
nicknamed the Blue Lions — gathered with drums and banners.

“This is the very first time since Kiryat Shmona was established that
the city was in the news not because of the connection with missiles,
attacks and war, but football,” he said.

The team’s rise can largely be traced to one man — Izzy Sheratzky,
a millionaire from Tel Aviv who made his money in Global Positioning
System devices that help track stolen cars and who founded the club 10
years ago.
Sheratzky, a native Israeli, began investing heavily in Kiryat Shmona
after being moved by images of its being pounded by Katyusha rockets 13
years ago. Eventually, he decided to buy two local clubs and merge them
with a dream of taking his new team to the highest level of European
soccer.

“In 1999, I saw the wars and the Katyushas and many bombs,” he said
in an interview last Saturday an hour before his team took the field.
“Many people left Kiryat Shmona. The situation was very bad. There was
no work and there was the bombs. I decided to take care of Kiryat Shmona
and to help them.”

At first, Sheratzky looked to the city’s immediate needs: a soup
kitchen for the poor, a children’s dental clinic, an English-language
school. But he concluded that the city’s residents needed something else
to bolster their morale, namely soccer. He bought the two teams, one in
Israel’s fourth division, the other in the fifth, and began thinking
big.

“We were 11th in the fourth league and now I hope we take the
championship, and maybe next year I am coming to London for the
Champions League!” he said, laughing.

When Sheratzky first arrived, the players thought his talk of rising
through the divisions and of one day winning the Champions League was
fanciful at best, deluded at worst.

ACT NOW for ISRAEL: Flush ‘LUSH’ Cosmetics!

LUSH Cosmetics has quietly closed its Beverly Hills, California location several months after a group known as “Join the Boycott LA” (www.JTBLA.com) organized a protest outside the store to expose the company’s support of PLO extremism. LUSH, with headquarters in the UK and stores in over 40 countries around the world, is using its customers’ money to support the PLO’s extremist “One World Campaign”. This virulently anti-Israel organization portrays Israel as an “illegal” occupier committing crimes against “Palestine” and grossly exaggerates the suffering in Gaza, placing responsibility solely on the Israelis.

There is much more work to be done. We urge you to ACT NOW FOR ISRAEL by sending an email to customercare@lush.co.uk to protest their anti-Israel extremism.

It has come to our attention that LUSH, a leading luxury handmade cosmetics company, gives a percentage of its profits to an anti-Israel organization called “OneWorld”. Upon visiting the OneWorld website (http://freedomoneworld.org/), it is very clear that they are supported by extreme anti-Israel groups that are sympathetic to terrorist activity against the State of Israel. For example, one of the supporting groups is called “Friends of al-Aqsa”. Visiting their website speaks for itself: http://www.foa.org.uk/.

Did You Know?

Israeli scientists developed the first fully computerized, no-radiation, diagnostic instrumentation for breast cancer.

Did You Know?

An Israeli-initiated project is drastically lowering the mortality rate of Ethiopian children infected with the AIDS/HIV virus.

LIVE Talk Radio from Israel – Tuesday Nights!

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Straight from the heart of Jerusalem comes the only English talk show on broadcast radio in the State of Israel. News, interviews, culture and ideas mixed with positivity and pride in the free, fruitful, and flourishing Jewish homeland.

Yishai and Malkah Fleisher, two well-known internet radio personalities, made the leap to broadcast radio on the new Galey Yisrael station in Israel, blazing a trail to create content for the growing segment of the Israeli public that speaks English. You won’t want to miss it!

We will be broadcast LIVE FROM ISRAEL every Tuesday Night from 5:00pm – 7:00pm (EST)

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I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.- Golda Meir